Before we dive into today's topic, I want to tell you about my encounters with differences and what set me on this path of helping people communicate and connect across cultures.

I was born in Nigeria and I spent the first nine years of my life living in and out of two military dictatorships. General Ibrahim Babaginda and General Sani Abacha and a lot of what I witnessed while growing up was ruthless suppression of human rights, violence, curfews, arrests, killings and exiles.

We even had someone win an election legally and then get put in jail for that. That was one of my earliest memories. His name was Chief Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola or M.K.O Abiola. I remember this vividly because my middle name is Abiola and that was his last name. I felt a weird connection with him even as a 4, 5 year old.

Add all this to the fact that Nigeria is a country of over 250 ethnic groups and many of the groups at the time were vying for ethnic domination.

To put it bluntly, there was chaos in the air.

This was my reality until we transitioned into a civilian government. At this point, my dad’s job as a diplomat was now super important because we as a country were now repairing our relationships all over the world.

As is the case with being a diplomat, you travel a lot. Our family was no exception. We moved to 5 countries and 4 continents by the time I was 17 so I had MANY experiences. Listed below are just a few of them:

The Black Experience

The African Experience

The Black African Experience

The International Student Experience

The Hidden Immigrant in Your Own Country Experience AND

The Immigration Experience Here in the United States

Needless to say, adaptability became my super power. How else was I going to navigate through these different levels of globalization, intersectionalism and identities? I needed to know how to communicate effectively across cultures and so as a walking contradiction, I resolved to become a bridge between cultures in such a way that it sparked connections.

I decided to that I would Use My Difference To Make A Difference. I developed that mission statement because I want people all over the world to recognize their self worth and to be seen, heard and understood.

That’s what I want to do with you all today. I want to show you all the value of diversity and inclusion. I know what it's like to not be seen, heard and/or understood so I have made it my personal mission to fix that problem.

Diversity and Inclusion is often a topic of debate for many but I hope by the time you're done reading this, you’ll be able to define both, make a case for both and outline a clear plan of action to achieving true inclusion in your workplace over a long term basis.

Sound like something you all want to hear?

Ok good.

Let’s begin.

First of all, let’s articulate the difference between diversity and inclusion.

What is diversity?

Diversity refers to demographic differences that distinguish one person from another. These differences may be observable or unobservable. Diversity goes beyond visible differences it’s also things we can’t see.

We have to be able to look beyond the surface level. Diversity takes into account many things like personality, communication, leadership style, learning styles, economic, cultural, work styles, language, social, privilege, education.

These are just some of the things behind your visible forms of diversity like age, race, gender and orientation.

When you just look at the visible, you miss opportunities to know who people really are.

True diversity links the visible to the invisible.

What about inclusion? What do you think it means?

Inclusion is the action or state of including or of being included within a group or structure. Inclusion is the state of being that supports diversity. It enables diverse individuals and groups to function in ways where differences are respected, gifts are valued and everyone is welcome regardless of their diversity. Inclusion is involvement and empowerment, where the inherent worth and dignity of all people are recognized.

The best analogy I’ve heard about these two is that Diversity is like a seed and inclusion is like the fruit. Most seeds don’t make it to the fruits stage because they haven’t been nourished properly. And if they aren’t nurtured properly, they won’t blossom.

So when leaders say they hired for diversity and it didn’t work out, it’s because the talent wasn’t nurtured the right way. They most likely didn’t feel included.

Add to that biases, assumptions, fear and lack of understanding and you have a very shaky foundation. Diversity isn’t about tokenizing people, filling quotas. It’s about leveraging differences and making all our differences work for us.

I want to talk about 5 ways you can make all your differences work for you. I call them the 5 A’s.

Let's start with the first A, Assess.

Assess

In this stage you’re in preparation mode and taking inventory of what the current temperature is like in your company around diversity and inclusion. For anything to be sustainable, you need to understand why you’re doing in the first place.

A lot of companies falter in this stage because they are being reactive and not proactive.

They heard something bad happened at Uber and H&M and so they just react.

As you’re assessing, these are some questions, you should begin to ask yourself. And they are as follows:

What is diversity to you?

What do you want the future of your organization to look like?

Do you view it as an asset or liability? Why or why not?

What is the business case?

Why are you considering doing this right now?

As a leader are you personally ready to take on this?

What’s in this strategy for organization?

What’s in this strategy for employees?

What’s in this strategy for stakeholders?

Are you able to commit your organization’s resources to this strategy over the long haul?

What types of relationships do you have right now and what types of relationships do you need to develop in order to make this a reality?

Can you be present when others need you or challenge you on this issue?

What biases exist currently and how will you measure the biases in the future?

What are the core values and principles building the organization?

Are there trusting relationships in the company?

Is honest dialogue promoted?

Do you have safe spaces for people to have honest dialogue without being ridiculed?

Key things to note!!!

In this stage, you’re not only assessing diversity for the economic case, you should also assess it for the morality case.

ANOTHER KEY POINT TO MAKE IS THIS. I'm sure you all will agree with me when I say that sustainable diversity and inclusion doesn't belong in the HR silo right?

It has to be a priority for leadership as well as HR as well as all the stakeholders of the company.

EVERYONE has to be involved. Commitment from the CEO, executives, HR, Mid level managers and employees across various business units.

A lot of companies neglect the mid level managers but that’s a mistake because often times they have significant influence on getting new policies established and implemented. They are also usually involved the most with day to day interactions with work spaces and majority of the employees.

Speaking of employees, assess how they feel about speaking out and their pain points. Do they feel like they can express themselves?

Another area to assess would be your suppliers and vendors. What messages are your suppliers and vendors sending and receiving about you?

Assess, Assess, Assess.

What about your community partners? How are you getting involved with things like scholarships/internships, summer programs, mentorship programs with at risk, cooperative programs with high schools, universities?

Assess, Assess, Assess.

Back to diversity being both an economic and moral compass priority. True diversity and inclusion occurs when it is operating from the head as well as the heart. The head is the business case and the heart is the emotional and psychological case. If you do this right, then you're able to create a situation where people accept people for much more than what they look like but for who they are.

Assess Assess Assess.

When I work with companies we go into multiple ways to assess the current situation and without fail, people are always surprised by what they discover about their company and employer brand.

Assess to find out what you want your organization's future to look like and to find out what you need to make it happen.

Arrange

This part is all about strategy. Here you're determining the plans of action you need to take in order to succeed. First thing you need to do here is to align your diversity and inclusion strategy with the overall vision of the organization.

Make sure that when you meet to discuss strategy, you're adding a diversity and inclusion component to all of your business units.

Every person in the company should understand how their job adds value to the overall strategy of the company as well as the diversity and inclusion goals.

So execs, middle managers, supervisors and team leads should constantly be asking the following question: "How does what I do fit in with our diversity and inclusion strategy?"

Adding it as a performance goal for management helps to hold leadership accountable.

In this stage, I also suggest a public declaration of next steps and then both a mission and vision statement should be crafted at the end of this exercise.

You want them to speak to your company's values and the company culture you aspire to cultivate.

In your mission statement, you are including who you are, what you do and why you do it. You want to also speak to what you value so highlighting things like why customers should do business with you, why community should trust you and how you show you care about quality, service and relationships are key.

These things matter

Your vision statement is all about what your company will look like as a result of your strategy. The big picture if you will.

The other necessary ingredient in the arrangement stage is that you start to form the team that can implement this strategy. So my recommendation is to form a diversity council that’s representative of the company. You want it to include HR, Leadership, Marketing, Operations, Finance and all the business units that exist in your company.

Remember diversity and inclusion has to include EVERYONE and be an active part of your organizational value.

You want the Diversity Council to be able to strategize and brainstorm solutions on the problems you have systematically.

You’re looking at loopholes in your current marketing, HR, and people policies.

Here are some questions you can use to get them started:

What are your organization values?

How can you make inclusiveness a way of being in your organization?

What are some suggestions and ideas for the marketing team?

How will you implement more inclusive policies based on what you assessed?

Which partners can you include on your efforts to make this happen?

What are the advantages?

What are the disadvantages?

What is happening internally?

What is your employer brand?

What programs will you launch to help with awareness?

Doing this serves a dual purpose. Not only does it inform your employees and the world about what you believe in, it also informs everyone of your commitment to achieving the vision you set.

Keep in mind as you’re setting these goals you’re making 3, 6, 12 month plans. This needs to happen to improve accountability.

Your tracking sheet or system should look like the following:

Mission

Vision

Governing Values

Goal #1

Description:

Objectives:

Major Activities/Timeline:

Key Performance Indicators:

Continuous Learning Strategies:

Goal #2

Description:

Objectives:

Major Activities/Timeline:

Key Performance Indicators:

Continuous Learning Strategies:

Goal #3

Description:

Objectives:

Major Activities/Timeline:

Key Performance Indicators:

Continuous Learning Strategies:

Apply

Once strategy has been arranged and designed, it's time to apply everything. This is where the training happens. Diversity and inclusion training should align with corporate strategies and every business unit. Make sure your trainings include opportunities for the following:

Honest dialogue

Creating safe spaces for saying no to the status quo

Managing Conflict

Respect for differences

Creating a sense of community

Overcoming Bias

Establishing clearly defined ethical boundaries

Win Win approaches to problem solving

Cooperative decision making

Equity based justice for all members

Ask yourself,

What message you want to send

What media you will use

How you will frame the communication program

As far as trainers, they could be in-house, external consultants or a combination of both. Training is going to cost money but poor training costs the most. That’s why you have to go through all the previous steps to know what you’re training for.

Assess, arrange and apply that arrangement.

Ask yourself these as you’re evaluating:

Who will be responsible for managing training?

What skill based training do you need that will support your inclusion strategy?

What does success in skill based training look like for your organization?

Who needs to be trained? On what will you base the need to be trained?

What are your most pressing needs in the organization?

Where do you begin?

How will you deliver this training? (webinars, in person, online, self-paced)

How will you track who attends the trainings?

How will you track progress of participants?

What other factors do you need to consider?

In this stage, there will be high potential of setbacks if the following exists:

A failure to get the highest level leader involved at the beginning

A general lack of accountability

A failure to incorporate skill-based inclusion training into the strategy

A failure to deal with the disadvantages of diversity strategies

Only providing training because you’re reactive

Misunderstanding of what diversity and inclusion means from everyone and not a select few

No addressing the negative attitudes or misunderstandings about diversity

Focus is on shame, blame and guilt

Failure to include follow up strategies

Failure to hold leadership accountable

Focus is only on the business case and not the ethical or moral case

Failure to acknowledge diversity and inclusion takes time, effort, resource and commitment

Failure to help employees see themselves in the diversity strategy

Failure to make it clear why diversity and inclusion strategies are necessary

Failure to make it safe for honest dialogue or reach the difference between honest discussions and mean spirited conversations

Ignoring the culture. Written policies don’t run organizations, unwritten rules do

Failure to remember the inclusion piece of diversity and inclusion

You can't avoid asking yourself these questions. I’m not done though. I want you all to probe even further and ask yourself these questions:

What are some of the barriers that are unique to your organization?

How will you address these issues?

What do you want to avoid happening in your organization?

What do you want to be sure does happen?

As you’re applying these things, here are some trainings that you can include as you are starting your training program:

Unconscious Bias Training

Communication Skills Training

Conflict Management Training

Management Skills Training

Ethics program Training

Team Building Training

Diversity Awareness Training

Decision-Making and Inclusive Leadership development Training

Stress Management Training

Communicating Across and Managing Differences Training

Problem Solving with Diversity in Mind Training

The Art of Intersectional Storytelling

Accountability & Analysis

In this stage, you’re being responsible and accountable for the actions you’ve taken. Here you address what worked and what didn’t work.

In order to be accountable, there must be clear and specific metrics.

As you’re evaluating progress, think of it as a report card and come up with your own grading system. Just like in elementary school, high school or college ask yourselves what qualifies for an A, B, C , D and F. Then give yourself a grade based on that.

On the measurement side, regularly reporting your findings in a public forum to your employees also helps to keep you accountable.

For example, you could do this at all hands meetings, within your company's internal communication channels, or in front of your community partners, etc.

When you do, make sure you bring these things up:

How you measured the organization’s success of your unique diversity and inclusion strategies

What key performance metrics you used? How often your leaders were measured and how often they will be measured?

Who will be doing the measurements of how well your leaders/managers are doing (bottom up and top down)? How you will measure your organization’s progress?

Will community partners have a say in how well they believe your organization is doing in accomplishing the strategy? If so, when?

Will you measure for skill development?

At the macro level, how you will attach goals to organizational performance objectives?

At the micro level, how you will establish team goals and individual performance?

All these set the table for you to always make it a priority. That covers the accountability and analysis piece, now let’s go to the final A

Affinity

This is all about sustainability and making sure all your efforts don’t go into the “o we had a great training that one time” bucket. For many companies and institutions, the single most important catalyst for greater diversity and inclusion is their affinity networks. They are usually led by volunteers who dedicate significant portions of their time to help recruit, develop and retain members of their network. Affinity groups are a key part of any diversity and inclusion strategy because they are voice for several identity groups. They help with the development of leaders, marketing campaigns, communications and visibility. Ultimately they help boost your employer brand.

Conclusion

A lot of today’s problems are caused because people don’t understand what’s different from them. They don’t understand how to deal with changes and so they try to get others to buy into their beliefs. That’s the wrong approach.

A lot of issues with diversity and inclusion are about deeply held beliefs, values and assumptions that have been unchallenged causing many to see nothing wrong with how they see the world.

What we need to do individually do is to examine the origin of our beliefs, the reasoning behind them and the purpose they served. Challenge yourself to be honest, candid and open about why you believe what you believe. Is there merit to it?

I want you all to start with your beliefs because they control basically everything about your behavior.

If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. This stuff is hard work. It takes time and commitment but it’s all worth it if you commit to doing the work. So I have this question for you: Are you part of your company’s problems or solutions?

Use your DIFFERENCES to make a DIFFERENCE.

If you're interested in having me come speak or consult with your organization, click here.

Tayo Rockson is an avid lover of sports, marketing and non profit who loves helping and meeting new people. This blog is a refection of all he has learned. You can reach him at tayorockson@yahoo.co.uk or on Twitter at @TayoRockson.